How I Know
by idealskeptic
Summary: When Annie hears about the book Katniss & Peeta are making, she writes a letter to Finnick - telling him how she knew, and knows, that she's alive when it seems so unlikely. She entrusts the letter, and her love, to Katniss & Peeta. One-shot. Post-Mockingjay, pre-epilogue. Canon.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing in regard to _The Hunger Games _or any part of what Suzanne Collins created. This is simply me borrowing and playing and loving it all.

**Author's Note: **This one-shot is set post-_Mockingjay_. It's canon, in terms of what happened and who lived. I was listening to the Within Temptation song "Farewell" yesterday and this is what came to me about Annie Cresta. I hope you like it. Please leave a review and tell me what you thought!

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**How I Know**

_Finnick, my Finnick_

_Katniss and Peeta are making a Remembrance Book of all the people who touched their lives who didn't survive to see the end of all this. Haymitch says they've asked him for help filling out the pages for the people they didn't know so well. He told me they're afraid to ask me to help, to talk about you and to talk about Mags. I'm going to send them something anyway, but I have to talk to you first._

_I wish they could ask me about you. They saw you die, though, and they feel guilty that they couldn't save you. I told them I forgive them, even though there isn't anything to forgive. You knew you might not come back to me. I knew you might not come back to me._

_My heart is shattered into tiny, jagged pieces that make my soul ache when I reach for you and you're not there but... the only person I blame for my pain is President Snow. Not Katniss, not Peeta, not Haymitch and Plutarch, and not you. Never you._

_You know how much I love you, don't you?_

_The sun rose in the morning because you were in my life, Finnick. _

_I know it would have risen anyway, but I don't care. You always told me how I healed your body, your heart, your mind, and your soul when you came home from the Capitol. You did that for me every day. _

_When you kissed me goodbye, when you kissed me hello, when you threw wet gobs of seaweed at me after I buried you in sand on the beach, when you carried me through the swamps to find those purple flowers I loved, when you took me so far out on the water that we couldn't see land because you said that I had to see the sunset, when you told me that you loved me..._

_That's how I knew I was alive, Finnick._

_It's how I knew my heart was still beating, that air was still passing through my longs. I could have suffered a thousand times more than I did and still been happy because I had you._

_And it's enough that I had you. Almost enough. I wanted you for so much longer than I got to have you. We should have grown old and gray together. We should have had a chance to live free from the rules, written and unwritten, that defined our lives. We should have had a chance to live._

_Shoulds get us nowhere in life, though, just like Mags always said. Remember how she used to tell us, when we moped around and depressed her, that the point of life is to live and to live beautifully? She did it, didn't she?_

_And we tried._

_I think she was proud of how we did, don't you?_

_I'm going to keep trying to live beautifully, Finnick. I have to. I have to live beautifully because you gave me life and because you were robbed of your chance to live. I'll live for us._

_I'll miss you every moment of every day, but I will live._

_That's okay, isn't it?_

_You gave me more than my life back, and I have more than you and me to live for. I have our son._

_You would love him so much, Finnick. You do love him, don't you? And you'll keep him safe from wherever you are?_

_He's four months old today. Lots of people thought I would name him after you, but I couldn't. I was afraid that would only be trying to replace you, and I couldn't do that to him. His name is Jack. Just like we talked about that night just before the last Reaping, I named him the name of an ordinary sailor. I want him to have the chance to be whoever he wants to be in this life. _

_Neither you nor I had that chance, so I want him to have it._

_Then again, if I could have been whoever I wanted and you could have been whoever you wanted, we might not have found each other._

_Still. _

_I promise to raise our son to be the man I know his father would have been had he been blessed with the gift of a long life. _

_I am sad to be without you. I am alone without you. I ache for you. _

_I am thankful that I had you. I am less alone because you were once with me. I will never forget the warmth of your embrace or of your kiss._

_Jack is asleep in the sand beside me as I write this. He won't mind if I smear ink on his tiny hand and let him leave his mark on this letter. I'd put the ink on his foot, but he sucks on his toes. Never his fingers, just his toes. I wonder if you sucked on your toes when you were a baby._

_When I sat down to talk to you through this letter, I meant to put it in a bottle and drop the bottle into the ocean's current. Now I'm afraid that someone might find it one day and I don't want just anyone to read it. I could just drop the paper in the ocean, but I can't let it be destroyed._

_So I'll send it to Katniss and Peeta. I know that they will appreciate the privacy of it and the meaning behind it. Maybe they'll even put it in their book. I hope so._

_This is how I know you. This is how I love you._

_This is not our final farewell, Finnick Odair. _

_I will never say farewell to you for the last time._

_Never._

_I love you far too much for that._

_I love you, Finnick._

_~Annie_

Katniss wiped the hem of her sleeve across her eyes as she ran her finger over the small inked handprint on the bottom of the letter. She and Peeta would seal the paper onto the pages of their book with salt water but it seemed somehow wrong to let her tears fall on it.

He was almost done with the sketch in the book and she looked over his shoulder as he immortalized the happiness, the lightness in Finnick's sea green eyes as he whispered in a giggling Annie's ear at a lunch table in District 13.

Her tears fell on his shoulder instead of on the letter.

His tears fell on the page in front of him.

They cried because they had each other and she was alone. They cried because they were afraid that they weren't as strong as she was, because they feared she wasn't as strong as she tried to seem. They cried because she trusted them with the most private moments of her love for the man they had watched die, the man who had died instead of them.

They would protect the words written on the page as though their lives depended on it.

**The End**


End file.
